Word: freuded
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Youth in Step. Schnitzler, like Freud, was born soon after mid-century in Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian Empire. Each was his mother's eldest child; each was soon handed over to nursemaids because mother was pregnant again; each was soon bereaved by the death of his next-born brother (Schnitzler at 14 months, Freud at 19). The Schnitzler family was the better off; Freud's father was an unsuccessful wool merchant, while Schnitzler's was a fashionable ear, nose and throat specialist, who basked in limelight reflected from theatrical patients. Both young men became physicians...
...Freud plunged into psychology and self-analysis, declared himself dedicated forever to the scientific search for the "naked truth." Having lived ascetically before marriage, he lived monogamously thereafter. Schnitzler discovered what he called "fictional truth," had a series of well-publicized affairs with glamorous actresses, and feverishly wrote about a character named Anatol (a thinly disguised self-portrait) who was a gay yet morbid epicure, a dandy with a death wish who thought he had to die to be truly free. Through the turmoil of world war and revolution, Schnitzler wrote play after play (notably Der Reigen or La Ronde...
...other respects, too, said Dr. Kupper, "Schnitzler's use of psychoanalytic concepts seems to exhibit the same progressions as Freud's scientific investigations." His early works, e.g., Paracelsus (1897), use hypnosis "as a comic and plot device to penetrate the realms of the unconscious." This was the period when Freud still hoped to put hypnosis to good medical use. Later plays, e.g., Intermezzo, Comedy of Seduction (1905, 1924), stress unconscious motivation of behavior not unlike Freud's Studies in Hysteria (1893). These, says Dr. Kupper, were followed by works involving concepts of resistance, transference and repression during...
Introspection & Intuition. Freud himself summed up this continuing similarity in his letter to Schnitzler: "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition-though actually as a result of sensitive introspection-everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons. I even believe that basically you are yourself a depth psychologist...
...Analyst Kupper suggests a question: If Poet Schnitzler was really a psychologist, was Psychologist Freud perhaps really a poet? For a long time before Freud, the soul had belonged in the domain of poets more than of physicians, who had increasingly concerned themselves with the physical being. Freud tried to subject the intangibles of the soul to the discipline of scientific materialism and determinism. And yet his insights may have been closer to the truths of poetry than to the truths of science...